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Researchers from Italy and Canada have made liquid light at room temperatures for the first time. The work paves the way for studying quantum hydrodynamics further and for future applications of this new type of matter in electronics devices.

Thanks to technological advances, scientists now have various ways of manipulating matter. Often times, these result in discovering new types of matter that posses unique properties — like the famous metallic hydrogen and the bizarre time crystal. The discovery of such materials leads to a wide range of potential applications in electronics. One of these is the so-called “liquid light,” a strange matter which researchers from the CNR NANOTECH Institute of Nanotechnology in Italy and the Polytechnique Montréal in Canada recently formed at room temperature for the first time.

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Space-based solar power has had a slow start, but the technology may finally take off in the next few decades. Since its inception, solar power has had a severe limitation as a renewable energy: it only works when the Sun is shining. This has restricted the areas where solar panels can be effectively used to sunnier, drier regions, such as California and Arizona. And even on cloudless days, the atmosphere itself absorbs some of the energy emitted by the Sun, cutting back the efficiency of solar energy. And let’s not forget that, even in the best of circumstances, Earth-bound solar panels are pointed away from the Sun half of the time, during the night.

So, for over half a decade, researchers from NASA and the Pentagon have dreamed of ways for solar panels to rise above these difficulties, and have come up with some plausible solutions. There have been several proposals for making extra-atmospheric solar panels a reality, many of which call for a spacecraft equipped with an array of mirrors to reflect sunlight into a power-conversion device. The collected energy could be beamed to Earth via a laser or microwave emitter. There are even ways to modulate the waves’ energy to protect any birds or planes that might wander into the beam’s path.

The energy from these space-based solar panels would not be limited by clouds, the atmosphere, or our night cycle. Additionally, because solar energy would be continuously absorbed, there would be no reason to store the energy for later use, a process which can cost up to 50 percent of the energy stored.

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Excellent lightning round questions below the audio. Between Dune and Hitchhikers Guide, Liz is indeed a nerd.

In this episode we talk about aging. It’s a condition that everyone experiences and indeed, one thing is certain: when it comes to aging, our condition is terminal. Our guest today is challenging that and fighting aging head on. We’re speaking with Liz Parrish, the CEO of BioViva, a biotech company dedicated to advancing gene and cell therapies to treat the diseases of aging. We dive into her work and learn about the results of the treatment that she received to slow and maybe even reverse the effects of aging.

Liz is a passionate advocate for patient access to these revolutionary treatments, and a couple years ago, Liz decided to take her own medicine – literally. In September 2015, Liz underwent genetic therapy with the aim of slowing and even reversing the effects of aging. She believes that aging should be classified as a disease to open up entirely new and untapped pathways to extend human lives and allow us to be healthier, longer.

Continue reading “Liz Parrish on Therapies to Slow and Reverse the Effects of Aging” | >

Deep learning has transformed the field of artificial intelligence, but the limitations of conventional computer hardware are already hindering progress. Researchers at MIT think their new “nanophotonic” processor could be the answer by carrying out deep learning at the speed of light.

In the 1980s, scientists and engineers hailed optical computing as the next great revolution in information technology, but it turned out that bulky components like fiber optic cables and lenses didn’t make for particularly robust or compact computers.

In particular, they found it extremely challenging to make scalable optical logic gates, and therefore impractical to make general optical computers, according to MIT physics post-doc Yichen Shen. One thing light is good at, though, is multiplying matrices—arrays of numbers arranged in columns and rows. You can actually mathematically explain the way a lens acts on a beam of light in terms of matrix multiplications.

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Researchers at the Scripps Research Institute Florida campus have refined the already state-of-the-art gene-editing system CRISPR. The new improvements boost the ability of CRISPR to target, cut and paste genes in human and animal cells and helps to address the concerns of off target gene mutations raised in a recent study [1].

What is CRISPR?

CRISPR is short for “Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat,” and is a gene editing system that exploits an ancient bacterial immune defense process. Some microbes combat viral infection by sequestering a piece of a virus’ foreign genetic material within its own DNA, to serve as a template. The next time the viral sequence is encountered by the microbe, it is detected immediately and cut up for disposal with the help of two types of RNA. Molecules called guide RNAs show the location of the invader, and the CRISPR effector proteins act as the scissors that cut it apart and destroy it.

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